Franz Kafka Prize Winner 2013 Israeli Author Amos Oz

28-May-2013

Israeli author Amos Oz has won the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize in the Czech Republic for 2013. As well as being a writer, novelist, and journalist, he is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba.

An international jury that included prominent German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki selected Oz for the prize, which is awarded annually with a $10,000 prize.

Since 1967, he has been a prominent advocate and major cultural voice of a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Oz's work has been published in some 41 languages, including Arabic in 35 countries. He has received many honours and awards, among them the Legion of Honour of France, the Goethe Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature, the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Israel Prize. In 2007, a selection from the Chinese translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness was the first work of modern Hebrew literature to appear in an official Chinese textbook.

Past winners have included the American novelist Philip Roth and Nobel laureates Elfriede Jelinek of Austria and Harold Pinter of Britain.

About the Prize

Founder of the Franz Kafka Prize is the Franz Kafka Society in Prague.
The organizer is the Franz Kafka Society; the city of Prague is a co-organizer. The Prize is organized under the auspices of the President of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic and the Lord Mayor of the city Prague.

The mission of the Franz Kafka Prize is the evaluation of artistically exceptional literary creation of contemporary author whose work addresses the readers regardless of their origin, nationality and culture, as well as the work of Franz Kafka, one of the greatest authors of modern world literature.

The Lord Mayor of the city Prague and the Chairman of the Franz Kafka Society will award the prize to the writer that has been selected by the international jury. The festive ceremony takes place in the ceremonial rooms of the Prague Old Town Hall always at the end of October at the occasion of the Czech State Holiday. Besides the financial sum of 10 000, - USD and a diploma, the laureate will gets a bronze statuette - a miniaturized model of the Franz Kafka Monument in Prague.

The jury membership is honorary. The jury meets once a year. The members choose one of them as a president for respective year and vote about the candidatures. The way of vote (secret, acclamation) is agreed in advance.

Candidatures of the Franz Kafka Prize
Nomination of the prize presentation is accorded exclusively to the international jury. The candidate can be an author of any nationality or any age. The prize can be awarded only to the living author. The prize can be awarded only to one candidate every year. The candidate can be an author of a prosaic work (novels, collection of short stories, collection of essays), poetry or drama, i.e. only a literary work (not journalistic, film or television, etc.) that was published in book form (the same for a drama). At least one of his/her works must be published in book form in the Czech language.

Criteria for winning the prize
The basic criterion is the quality and exclusivity of the artwork, its humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its e